Analysis of Perceptions of Primary School Principals and Teachers About Parents

Problem: Education is not a process that takes place only at schools. A student spends only a certain time at school and spends his free time after school with his family and social circle. As a consequence, a large part of young people’s success at school is described by the characteristics of his family, and parents’ inadequate participation in education is seen as one of the most important reason in their failure. For this reason, families are one of the most important and indispensable parties for the schools to have continuous cooperation. To ensure this cooperation; managers, teachers and families should act knowing about each others’ expectations and needs. Perception of school managers and teachers about parents may help to determine the obstacles in the participation of parents in education, caused by both parents and managers and teachers. Aim: The aim of the research is to identify perceptions of primary school principles and teachers about parents using metaphor analysis. Method: This research is a descriptive analysis to determine the current status and to analyze. In this research, qualitative research technique was used to collect, analyze and interpret data and technically metaphor analysis was used. Study group of this research consists of 73 primary school managers and 154 teachers working in 3 central districts of Konya Metropolitan Municipality in the academic year 2008-2009. The study group was asked to complete the sentences starting with “Parents look like..., because ...” to collect data. Data were analyzed by content analysis method. Analyzing was performed in four phases. In the first phase, metaphors developed by each participant were encoded by analyzing the sentences completed by managers and teachers. Papers, in which a certain metaphor was not framed or in which there was no logical explanation for the metaphors or in which the participant was not specific about the feature of students’ guardians were eliminated. After this process, a total of 104 papers from 38 managers and 67 teachers were evaluated. After analyzing the papers, a total of 64 metaphors were obtained. In the second step, metaphors produced by the participants were grouped into 9 themes according to their explanations. In this phase, studies for validity and credibility were also done. To provide validity, data were comprehensively reported and how the results were obtained was told in detail. To provide credibility, the ratio of the consensus among the encoders was used, it was seen that the ratio of the consensus among the encoders was 87,3 %. In the third phase, a table is created to show the relationship between the metaphors and the themes created for the reader to see the metaphors and themes created. As the second step in this phase, we tried to present the themes created clearly. To do this, metaphors created by the managers and teachers were presented in direct quotes. In the last phase, the metaphors created, the themes metaphors created were analyzed according to the data in the covered text. Findings: Metaphors about parents, created by school managers and teachers were grouped in 9 themes. These themes and their hypothesis are below: 1-Protective parent theme: Parents are protecting their children, not deliberately, but instinctively. 2-Finance source parent theme: By school managers and teachers, parents are seen as the people who are put in a situation to give financial support to school. 3-Bossy parent theme: Parents want to interfere everything at school and to oppress the school employees. 4-Nitpicking parent theme: Parents are looking for the shortcomings of the school managers and teachers and think that it is their duty to complain about them. 5-Self-interested parent theme: Parents want to make managers and teachers do everything without doing nothing, while they are expecting managers and teachers to be perfect all the time. 6-Dreamer parent theme: Parents do not see their children in a realistic way, for this reason they sometimes hurt their children. 7-Open-to-change parent theme: Parents are the factors who can contribute to their children’s education if they are paid attention and led enough. 8-Unaware parent theme: Parents do not cooperate enough with the school and do not know what is right for their children. 9-Indifferent parent theme: Parents do not contribute to their children’s education. They avoid cooperation with managers and teachers. Results And Recommendations: Two results are concluded from the analysis of the findings of this research: 1-Most of the parents are unaware and indifferent to their children’s education. As a consequence, they do not know what is right for their children and they do not cooperate enough with their children. They just show protective behavior over their children instinctively. 2-Managers and teachers do not see parents as the stakeholders of educational activities. Seeing themselves as experts, they expect parents not to interfere their activities and do as they say. When these two results are evaluated together, it is understood that while managers and teachers blame parents to be indifferent, they also do not see them as stakeholders and they expect parents’ participation to be restricted by their limits and that they adopted the role of unquestionable rightfulness of themselves. Recommendations made according to the results are the following: (1) Researches should be made on the school level to determine the points that prevent parents’ participation in Turkey. (2) School managers and teachers need to organize activities within the conditions of schools to raise awareness without choosing the easy way of explaining the situation by unconsciousness and indifference of the parents. (3) School managers and teachers need to create a democratic environment to ensure parents’ participation of school managing and education-training activities and need to support parents who want to contribute.